Cognitive effects of states of consciousness: Do changes in states of consciousness affect judgments and evaluations?

Evaluation of severity of various indicators, signs and symptoms is a highly important cognitive act, because it often precedes the decision to act or not to act in order to forestall the event or phenomenon implicated by the indicators. We perform many severity evaluations and judgments over the course of our everyday lives: we evaluate the soundness of our computers that sometimes seem too slow, we evaluate the relationships we have with our life partners, we evaluate dangers and we even evaluate the probability for world peace. Evaluations of severity represent one kind of evaluations people often do. But there are many more kinds, such as evaluating honesty (of politicians and others), likelihood of events, and the kind of emotion people's faces express. Evaluations of these kinds seem to be based mainly on the data and knowledge that the evaluator possesses. Nevertheless, they cannot be dissociated from personal influences to which individuals are subjected, such as their emotional states, their changes in mood and even their states of consciousness. This assumption needs support through research. The present chapter describes research that was done at Tel-Aviv University, which examines the effects of states of consciousness on severity judgments and evaluations. The study is based on the theory of meaning (Kreitler and Kreitler, 1990) that defines states of consciousness as the organization of the entire cognitive system at a given time. This theory will be described further on.